Media Magic Making Class Invisible Essay

Social class and social roles have come to be shaped and defined by the media that surrounds every society today. Gregory Mantsios' essay Media Magic: Making Class Invisible disscusses the biases of media on social class. The article explains how each class is distorted in the media and how the "media is neither objective, balanced, independent, nor neutral," (Mantosis 2000). The article argues that the “ Mass Media” has created an “equal opportunity” image for all social classes. This in part has led to all societies retaining “ illusions about living in an egalitarian society,” (Mantosis 2000) when in fact, classes are not equal at all. The article does cover each social class, including biased images versus reality. The paper does not
Mantosis organizes his article in sections such as The Poor Do Not Exist and The Middle Class Is Us, which is where he states which group will be discussed. Mantsios discusses the media playing a part in how society identifies themselves and where societies members find themselves in history. Matsios states that overall mass media ignored the poor, but when the poor are portrayed, it is more so a statistic then a particular person. “ Coverage like this desensitizes us to the poor by reducing poverty to a number,” (Mantsios 2000). Mantsios goes on to state that the media claim that the poor essentially put themselves into poverty, and that the lower class is just having “ bad luck.” An important theme in the article would be Mantsios use of “we-ness” which in sense is used to speak to an audience in hopes for the audience to relate or share like-mindedness. The article goes on to state that the wealthy and or middle class have claim to fames, unlike the poor who are statistics. Wealthy men and women are presumed to be benefits for a society and are figures for the middle working class to look up to. Which brings the big “us”, the people who essentially ignore the poor and according to Mantsios, “ share an intellectual and moral superiority over the disadvantaged.” ( Mantsios 2000 p.174) Mantsios goes on to state “ Media inverts reality so that those who are working class and middle class learn
Economic Inequality and Government spending in the “ New Gilded Age,” states that American middle class citizens were largely not concerned with government spending on conflicting interests. Americans who had the attitude to help those poorer, in the lower class did not push for more government spending in favor of helping lower class individuals. While the attitude was the help, the middle class Americans preferred to have government spending filtered towards more policies that would benefit the middle class. As Mantosis states, while the middle class acknowledges and shares attitudes about helping the poor lower class, middle class residents turn a blind eye. The news media categorizes the wealthy and middle class interests into the same category, leaving resentment towards the lower class. Just as the Americans did in the article by Hayes, in talking about attitude versus